So Materials (resources) & Energy (oil/gas/coal) make up 22.5% of the ASX/S&P300.

Sooooo, the ANU makes a big song & dance about selling 5.1% of its direct equities which are in “black listed” companies.

But then outsources the domestic equities portfolio to an enhanced index manager who will most probably try aim to outperform the ASX/S&P300 index with has a 22.5% weighting in the companies they are so desperate to avoid.

So somehow it’s not okay to have a 5.1% exposure to something DIRECTLY.

But via one degree of separation, it is okay to have a 22.5% exposure to something.

28 Responses to Guest Post: feelthebern – More questions for the ANU

When they say an enhanced index manager I suspect that is code for someone with a green investment index like this mob:

“Both the ASX50 and ASX100 model portfolios are constructed around negative screens. Companies that are given a red rating – companies that ******** deems as being damaging to people or the environment – are excluded from investments. Investments are then made in companies rated yellow for doing no harm and green for positively benefiting people or the environment. The index is weighted by market capitalisation.”

I’ve removed the name as I really don’t want to advertise such a company.

The stocks to be divested represent around 5.1 per cent of the University’s Australian equity holdings and approximately one per cent of its total investment holdings.

But I ask: where are “the University’s Australian equity holdings”?

And I ask: what is the line “Investments – Direct Share Holdings”?

Could they be huffing and puffing over 5.1% of just 32K???

I mean: could I have mis-read those two items by considering them to be the same? OR could they really think that we could be that stupid? The latter is so damnably, insolently supercilious, that I hope it is the former…

Ultimately, if they want to preclude investments from their portfolio, they can do whatever they want.
Boards can be removed.
My gripe is their holier than thou attitude.
They pat themselves on the back & will be the talk of the town in lefty circles this weekend.
But ultimately, they now will have a bigger exposure to the very companies they are trying to avoid.
They can’t be that dumb not to know that.

I wouldn’t be holding the E-Cat up as the future saviour of the world. That thing is 100% scam.

And the trouble with all those “proof of concept” models is that they rarely if ever scale up to mega-industry level.

Nor to greenies ever think how long it took to deploy what we have now – power stations and the grid plus reticulation, and petroleum fuel from large-scale refineries plus the distribution network. They think that these new ideas can be instantly installed into the economy, and immediately replace “dat ebil coal and dat ebil oil stuff”.

ANU vice-chancellor Ian Young has a classic hypocrite’s defence of the mooching class and ANU’s divestments jihad in Monday’s ShakeMyHamas.com:

The real debate in climate should be about producing cost-effective alternative energy. Sticking our collective heads in the sand and ignoring a changing world will ensure we do destroy jobs.

So where are all the ANU research programs dedicated to cost-effective commercial energy technologies that don’t require government subsidy? Not a word. Mooch mooch mooch.

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